This is a 400$ dress made by NYC based designer Lindsey Thornburg.
More importantly Aaron Glass will be giving a talk on the history of the Totem Pole as an iconic object next Sunday. Since the first European contact the totem has progressively come to symbolize Native American culture as a whole - as if it had preserved all the qualities of a culture and tradition lost. Problematizing the issue Glass will touch upon the changes the totem underwent since early colonialism and the reasons for its now cult status (in theme parks, in fashion - see image - or within more serious repatriation and heritage issues).
Glass is an anthropologist teaching material culture at the Bard Graduate Center in NYC, where he is also a museum fellow.
The talk will be given October 24th at the Observatory Room at 543 Union Street (near Nevins) in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
It's 5$ (800 times less than the dress) and will convince you how stupid the dress is too.
... Afterthoughts: Totem and Taboo
Among the many things I gathered at last night's talk: 1913 Freud publishes "Totem and Taboo", Totemism in 1960s scholarship, more totem poles went up between 1970 and 2000 than from 1870 and 1900, the white man's fur trade in the late 18th century brought new more efficient tools and glues and better brighter paints, 1937 Disney comes out with Snow White:
JP Gaultier's fall/winter 2010-11 Prêt-à-Porter collection of embroidered patterns on skirts, hoodies and jackets is up at Colette - a collection the concept store describes as one "dédiée à la France métissée. Afrique, Mongolie, Chine, Mexique, ses influences sont multiples et mixées à son propre style."
Which doesn't say much - fashion likes to find its origins in concepts by simplifying them - but does demonstrate that this year's crew of interns, while forgetting to include Peruvians to their list of bearers of colourful patterns and being particularly out-of-date with what is multiculturalism, struck up an interesting point, not so much on contemporary French identity, as on contemporary French (and more broadly western) material culture.
I just finished an intensive 18 hour embroidery stage in the last of Paris' embroidering ateliers: Atelier Lesage - an all female crew of 70 pattern makers, designers and embroiders headed by one man (François Lesage, the owner) who spend hours crocheying and needling beads, threads and precious jewels unto haute-couture creations. The last atelier of a French tradition that now is done in countries with cheaper labour - 101 econ: this is called offshoaring.
Back at Colette, with my newly acquired knowledge of point de Boulogne and point de graine, it was clear that Gaultier's prêt-à porter hadn't, indeed, gone through these brodeuses' hands - with the inside full of small industrial white strings. It's hard to blame JP in today's economic structure (the hoddie's already selling for 1561 bucks), but with the chances of the hoodie coming straight from China - just like it's so-called conceptual roots - it's a perfect artefact of our Western contemporary material culture's base: a métissage of concepts, sure, maybe, but especially a métissage of producers, makers and consumers. And not even a métissage really but more an international chain of production/consumption that goes mostly one way.
I still love it. But that's because I'm French, and as Gaultier has demonstrated the French are all about métissage.
